A Former Lens-Based Artist Turns to Textile, Rendering Gestures of Care
Exhibition view of Hana Miletić: Soft Services, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2024. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Since 2015, Hana Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series, including one called Materials, which includes brightly colored weavings made on a 1970s loom. The Zagreb-born, Brussels-based artist’s formal training is in photography, and each of the weavings in the series is inspired by a street photograph. The photographs depict the temporary repairs made to buildings and objects in urban public spaces, and in Soft Services, her first US solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she displays weavings inspired by the maintenance of the List Center building and development in the nearby East Cambridge neighborhood.
Hana Miletić, Materials, 2023. Courtesy the artist, The Approach, London, and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, Kosovo, and Paris. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Upon entering the large single room that houses Soft Services, it’s immediately clear that Miletić is a talented textile artist. The pieces are intricately woven, some almost hyper delicate, whether they are a few inches wide or take up most of a wall. One Materials piece, a yellow, rectangular woven length modeled after a piece of caution tape and tied in a bow, is one of the more obvious examples of Miletić’s work being inspired by the real world.
The connection between this textile and its real-world inspiration is hard to miss, but that’s about the only piece where that’s the case. Other pieces from the Materials series include a beige square with a red X made from organic raw wool and mercerized cotton; a layered piece of small ribbon-like scraps twisted and knotted around themselves and each other, made from mercerized cotton, recycled nylon, repurposed plastic, organic raw wool, variegated organic silk, and gauze yarn; and a large hanging panel of brown rectangles connected with thin blue strips, made with cottolin, peace silk, organic and variegated cotton, repurposed and recycled polyester, mercerized cotton, organic linen, and repurposed polyrattan.
At Left: Hana Miletić, Materials, 2022. At Right: Hana Miletić, Materials, 2023. Installation view: Hana Miletić: Soft Services, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2024. Courtesy the artist, The Approach, London, and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, Kosovo, and Paris. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Again, Miletić’s textiles are impressive — I especially enjoyed the diversity of materials used in the layered piece and the size of the rectangular paneled piece — but the connection to the outside world is only recognizable by reading the accompanying descriptions, and I found myself wishing for a more direct distillation of the pieces’ inspirations in the exhibition. The layered piece is based on the makeshift interventions done to trees and plants growing in urban environments, and the large weaving is a replica of the brown paper panels that covered the doors to the List Center’s galleries during renovations to the entry space. But I wouldn’t have ever guessed that by just looking at the pieces.
Exhibition view: Hana Miletić: Soft Services, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2024. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
If Miletić’s goal with this exhibition is to bring attention to stopgap repairs and infrastructure improvements that often indicate the gentrification-based construction changes East Cambridge has been subject to since the late 1990s, it might have been better accomplished with more explicit real-world touchpoints.
Leaving out the photographs was not an accident — the exhibition’s description says: “The artist’s abiding interest in these repairs stems from her belief that they trace ‘developments affecting the cities’ communities,’ and stand as ‘subjective gestures of care.’ Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in the medium of photography.” But it’s hard to forget about the photography, when the descriptions mentioned it frequently and even said Miletić’s fidelity to the photographs was so strong that she used it to determine the heights at which the works should hang in the gallery. I can respect her reverence for hand work, but being able to see the photographs would’ve added a depth to this exhibition that it was missing.
Outside of the exhibition space, there’s a series of books on subjects related to Miletić’s work, titles like Fray: Art and Textile Politics by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Women and Industry in the Balkans: The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector by Chiara Bonfiglioli, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture by Sadie Plant, and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, based on an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke. These books supplement the exhibition with more background and context at the intersection of industry, gendered labor, technology, and textile production—a nice touch by MIT List.
Miletić’s work has always been community-focused; her series Felt Workshops includes collectively felted wool pieces made with other female-identifying first-generation immigrants to Brussels. The works in Soft Services are similarly community-driven; and even the title is a nod to care work and reproductive labor. (The term describes services provisioned by workers over time, like catering, housekeeping, and landscaping, as opposed to “hard services” like plumbing and electrical systems.) These soft services, these “quotidian repairs to the surface things,” are part of inhabiting and shaping a shared world, Miletić says. I appreciate the abstract interpretation of that concept, but I think it would have been stronger with more realness.
Soft Services is on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center through August 4, 2024.
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